Islamic fundamentalism has been defined as a revivalist and reform movement of Muslims who aim to return to the founding scriptures of Islam. The term has been used interchangeably with similar terms such as Islamism, Islamic revivalism, Qutbism, Islamic extremism, Islamic activism, but also criticized as pejorative, a term used by outsiders who instead ought to be using more positive terms such as Islamic activism or Islamic revivalism.
Bassam Tibi, is a Syrian-born German political scientist and professor of international relations specializing in Islamic studies and Middle Eastern studies. He was born in 1944 in Damascus, Syria to an aristocratic family, and moved to West Germany in 1962, where he later became a naturalized citizen in 1976.
Gilles Kepel, is a French political scientist and Arabist, specialized in the contemporary Middle East and Muslims in the West. He is Professor at Sciences Po Paris, the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) and director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program at PSL, based at Ecole Normale Supérieure. His latest english-translated book, Away from Chaos. The Middle East and the Challenge to the West was reviewed by The New York Times as “an excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region”. His last essay, le Prophète et la Pandémie / du Moyen-Orient au jihadisme d'atmosphère, just released in French, has topped the best-seller lists and is currently being translated into English and a half-dozen languages. The excerpt The Murder of Samuel Paty is presently released in the Issue 3 of Liberties Journal.
John Louis Esposito is an American academic, professor of Middle Eastern and religious studies, and scholar of Islamic studies, who serves as Professor of Religion, International Affairs, and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is also the founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding at Georgetown.
Asef Bayat is an Iranian-American scholar. He is currently the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, Sociology, and Middle Eastern studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was previously a Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern studies and held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He served as Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and ISIM Chair of Islam and the Modern World at Leiden University.
Middle Eastern studies is a name given to a number of academic programs associated with the study of the history, culture, politics, economies, and geography of the Middle East, an area that is generally interpreted to cover a range of nations including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. It is considered a form of area studies, taking an overtly interdisciplinary approach to the study of a region. In this sense Middle Eastern studies is a far broader and less traditional field than classical Islamic studies.
Fred McGraw Donner is a scholar of Islam and Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago. He has published several books about early Islamic history.
Hugh Nigel Kennedy is a British medievalist and academic. He specialises in the history of the early Islamic Middle East, Muslim Iberia and the Crusades. From 1997 to 2007, he was Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews. Since 2007, he has been Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London.
Norman Arthur Stillman, also Noam, is an American academic, historian, and Orientalist, serving as the emeritus Schusterman-Josey Professor and emeritus Chair of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma. He specializes in the intersection of Jewish and Islamic culture and history, and in Oriental and Sephardi Jewry, with special interest in the Jewish communities in North Africa. His major publications are The Jews of Arab Lands: a History And Source Book and Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity. In the last few years, Stillman has been the executive editor of the "Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World", a project that includes over 2000 entries in 5 volumes.
Nur Yalman is a leading Turkish social anthropologist at Harvard University, where he serves as senior Research Professor of Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies.
Nikki R. Keddie is an American scholar of Eastern, Iranian, and women's history. She is Professor Emerita of History at University of California, Los Angeles.
Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
Roy Parviz Mottahedeh is an American historian who is Gurney Professor of History, Emeritus at Harvard University, where he taught courses on the pre-modern social and intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East and is an expert on Iranian culture. Mottahedeh served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1987 to 1990, and as the inaugural director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University from 2005 to 2011. He is a follower of the Baha'i faith.
Jere L. Bacharach was a Professor Emeritus, in the Department of History, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.
Islamic revival refers to a revival of the Islamic religion, usually centered around enforcing sharia. A leader of a revival is known in Islam as a mujaddid.
Nayereh Esfahlani Tohidi is an Iranian-born American professor, researcher, and academic administrator. Tohidi is a professor emerita and former chair of gender and women’s studies, and the founding director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at California State University, Northridge.
Pedram Khosronejad is a socio-cultural and visual anthropologist of contemporary Iran. He is of Iranian origin and commenced his studies in painting and in Visual Art Research before moving to France with a Ph.D. grant in 2000. He obtained his D.E.A. at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and obtained his Ph.D. at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). His research interests include cultural and social anthropology, the anthropology of death and dying, visual anthropology, visual piety, holy artifacts, and religious material culture, with a particular interest in Iran, Persianate societies and the Islamic world.
Moshe Sharon is an Israeli historian of Islam.
Heather J. Sharkey is an American historian of the Middle East and Africa, and of the modern Christian and Islamic worlds. Her books and articles have covered topics relating to nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonial studies, missionary movements, religious communities, and language politics, especially in Egypt and Sudan. She is currently Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.
Asad Q. Ahmed is an American scholar who is the Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture and Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
